China's disregard for human rights affects us, too

Within five years, China will be second only to the United States as a great economic, financial, political and military power. How it behaves abroad is going to matter more and more, and how it behaves abroad is intimately connected to how it behaves at home. Which is why Western businesses and governments must stop colluding in China's arrant neglect for human rights solely because the immediate commercial prospects are so enticing.

Last week, Sir John Bond, chair of HSBC, which owns a stake in China's fifth-largest bank, told Radio 4's Today programme that Chinese democracy can come only after more fundamental needs (food and shelter) have been met, echoing President Hu Jintao's line almost word for word. Sir John is not alone. Most Western democracies and businesses have shown themselves prepared to be tolerant of China's totalitarian regime. Human rights will come later, seems to be the assumption.

Yet Hu Jintao's regime is looking increasingly unlovely as it confronts the demands from a richer and better educated population, hungry for the rule of law and basic human rights. Instead, it sees the Hu regime intensify its control of the media and its use of censorship. These, along with intensified security and the fixing of the courts, have become important tools in its grip on power.

China's record on sacking and imprisoning dissident journalists is appalling. The most recent example of this cavalier attitude to press freedom was the removal of Yang Bin, editor of China's boldest and best tabloid, the Beijing News, fired for publishing reports of corruption and the growing clashes between police and villagers protesting over unfair confiscation of their land. Both breach the country's strict censorship rules. Yet more rules forbid journalists from travelling freely, while close to a billion dollars have been spent on policing the internet, with which, to their shame, both Microsoft and Google co-operate.

China's apologists in the West regard a free media with ambiguity. They see that they are important, but they too readily sympathise with the Communist party's fear that they are a threat to authority and that censorship is, thus, an unfortunate necessity. They should think again. Yang Bin's battle is not just for press freedom. The same authoritarianism compromises China's courts, universities, trade unions, businesses and approach to the environment. In an interconnected world, that endangers us all. Human rights cannot 'come later'; they are indispensable both to China's economic and social health and, in the long term, to our own. Time is running out.

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